Post on 13-Jan-2017
PROJECT KHULUMA
:USING SMS TALK TO TACKLE
HIV STIGMA AMONG SOUTH AFRICAN ADOLESCENTS
CHARLOTTE XIAOU WUKing’s College London
EGO-MEDIA• European Research Council funded,
5 year project• Examining impact of digital and
social media on self-presentation• Inter-disciplinary: life-writing,
cultural studies, digital & medical humanities, psychiatry, English, sociolinguistics
http://ego-media.org
PROJECT KHULUMA (“talk” in isiZulu)• Groups of 10 - 12 young people• Participants aged 10 – 19• Recruited through hospitals in
Cape Town and Pretoria• Groups last 3 months• Each group contains an adult
trained facilitator• Significant increase in perceived
social support and wellbeing
ADOLESCENTS & HIV• More than 2 million adolescents (10 – 19 years old) living with HIV• AIDS now the second most common cause of death among
adolescents globally, and the leading cause of death among adolescents in Africa• Over 15% of young women and 5% of young men aged 15 – 24 in
South Africa living with HIV• Worldwide, AIDS-related deaths among 10 – 19 year olds tripled
between 2000 – 2015; rose by 50% in this group between 2005 and 2012 compared to a 30% decline seen in the general population
HIV in SOUTH AFRICA: SOME BACKGROUND
1982: First case of AIDS detected in South Africa
1985: First AIDS related death
1993: National Health Department announces that number of reported HIV infections increased by 60% since 1991
1994: First ANC government elected; End of apartheid regime
1995: Treatment Action Campaign founded
2000: President Thabo Mbeki suggests that HOV does not cause AIDS at International AIDS Conference in Durban
2003: Government finally approves plan to make ART available (from 2004)
2011: Government announces all people with CD4 count of 350 will have ART
Estimated 5.8 million people living with HIV in South Africa (2014)
Public health education programmes have traditionally relied on two modes of outreach: “media (radio, television, movies, billboards, etc.) and direct personal communication (discussion groups, individual counselling, etc.)” (Drescher 2010)
SOUTH AFRICA ONLINE / DIGITAL DIVISIONS“Many – including national policymakers – see the digital world as the key to Africa’s renaissance, an opportunity to leapfrog the barriers of underdevelopment and claim a place in a post-industrial information economy. But in other respects, the Internet seems a repetition of a familiar economy, with a handful of international service providers setting up subsidiaries in South Africa … in Howard Rheingold’s (1993) term, ‘homesteaders’ of an ‘electronic frontier’.”
- Martin Hall (2000), ‘Digital SA’
MENTAL HEALTH AND SMS / ONLINE TALKSTIGMA AND SHAME• Kemeny et al 2004: “threats to social
status are directly relevant to survival and reproduction”• Sensitivity to negative social
evaluation linked to faster immunological declines & poorer outcomes from HAART• “an integrated set of psychobiological
processes is initiated”
LANGUAGE AND CMC• Turn in narrative studies towards
smaller, less ‘grand’ units of communication cf. conversation analysis• Georgokopolou 2007: Small Stories,
Interaction and Identities: everyday interactional situations as crucial sites of subjectivity and self-fashioning